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5-1 Chapter 5 Understanding Buyer Behavior and the Communication Process 5-2 • Describe the four stages of consumer decision making. • Explain how consumers adapt their decision-making processes based on involvement and experience. • Discuss how brand communication influences consumers’ psychological states and behavior. • Describe the interaction of culture and advertising. • Explain how sociological factors affect consumer behavior. • Discuss how advertising transmits sociocultural meaning in order to sell things. 5-3 Consumers as Decision Makers • Marketers need a keen understanding of their consumers as a basis for effective brand communication. • This understanding begins with a view of consumers as systematic decision makers who follow a predictable process in making choices among products and brands. • Stage 1—The process begins when consumers perceive a need (functional or emotional). • Stage 2—It proceeds with a search for information (internal or external) that will help in making an informed choice through alternative evaluation (structured by the consideration set and by applying evaluative criteria). • Stage 3—The search-and-evaluation stage is followed by purchase. • Stage 4—Then, in postpurchase use and evaluation, cognitive dissonance can be encountered and customer satisfaction is ultimately determined. 5-4 Modes of Decision Making • Some purchases are more important to people than others, a fact that adds complexity to consumer behavior. • To accommodate this complexity, marketers think about the level of involvement that attends any given purchase. • High or low involvement and experience with a product or service category determine the mode of consumer decision making: • Extended problem solving—high involvement, low experience • Limited problem solving—low involvement, low experience • Habit or variety seeking—low involvement, high experience • Brand loyalty—high involvement, high experience • Experience refers to a consumer’s familiarity with a product of service. • Involvement refers to the personal importance placed on the choice of product or service. 5-5 Key Psychological Processes • Brand messages are developed to influence the way people think about products and brands, specifically their beliefs and brand attitudes. • Marketers use multi-attribute attitude models (MAAMs) to help them ascertain the beliefs and attitudes of target consumers. A MAAMs analysis has four main components; the evaluative criteria, importance weights, consideration set, and beliefs. • Executing a MAAMs analysis involves: • Step 1—specify evaluative criteria for relevant brands • Step 2—ask consumers to rate brands against criteria • Step 3—identify salient beliefs • Step 4—develop promotional response (correct misperceptions, increase importance of evaluative criteria, change product to satisfy evaluative criteria) • Consumers in-turn employ perceptual defenses (cognitive consistency impetus, selective attention) to ignore or distort most of the commercial messages (advertising clutter) to which they are exposed. • When consumers are not motivated to process an advertiser’s message thoughtfully, the marketer may need to feature peripheral cues as part of the message (Elaboration Likelihood Model or ELM). 5-6 Consuming in the Real World Culture and Advertising • Advertisements are cultural products, and culture provides the context in which an ad will be interpreted. • Marketers who overlook the influence of culture are bound to struggle in their attempt to communicate with the target audience. • Culture is based on values, which are enduring beliefs that shape more-transitory psychological states, such as brand attitudes. Within a culture, individuals share patterns of behavior, or rituals. Violating cultural values and rituals is a sure way to squander advertising dollars. • Advertising and other elements of the promotional mix turn products into brands when they wrap brands with cultural meaning. • Brands with high cultural capital are worth more. In these ways, brands are cocreated by consumers and marketers. 5-7 Consuming in the Real World, Continued • Consumer behavior is an activity that each person undertakes before a broad audience of other consumers. • Families (intergenerational effect, life stage), race and ethnicity, geopolitics, gender, and community (brand communities) are important influences on consumption. • Who consumers are—their identity—is changeable; through what they buy and use, consumers can rapidly and frequently change aspects of who they are. • Celebrities influencers are particularly important in this regard. 5-8 Advertising, Social Rift, and “Revolution” • Consumers sometimes use their consumption choices to stake out a position in a “revolution” of some sort, such as youth culture or political-social movements. • Marketers should remember that anytime there is a time of great change, many new opportunities are opened up. 5-9 How Ads Transmit Meaning • Advertising transfers a desired meaning to the brand by placing the brand within a carefully constructed social world represented in an ad, or “slice of life.” • Marketers paint a picture of the ideal social world, with all the meanings they want to impart to their brand. • The brand is carefully placed in that picture, and the two (the constructed social world and the brand) rub off on each other, becoming a part of each other. • Meaning is thus transferred from the ad’s constructed social world to the brand. • Anthropologist Grant McCracken refers to this as the “movement of meaning” and created a model to illustrate the process.